


other, stranger things

by seventhswan



Category: Dangan Ronpa
Genre: F/F, Game Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-26
Updated: 2014-09-26
Packaged: 2018-02-18 22:13:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2363942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhswan/pseuds/seventhswan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hina and Sakura, before the flood (and after).</p>
            </blockquote>





	other, stranger things

**Author's Note:**

> Takes notice only of game canon. I cried like a stuck baby at Sakura’s death, I'm still not over it.

**i.**

All of the girls in the group of ultimate students are pretty, but one of them is _beautiful_. That girl - who fills up Hina’s vision whether she’s standing in the centre of the group making a point or tucked away in a corner, quietly observing everything - is like a Greek statue, a drawing on an anatomy chart. A perfect specimen. She has hair the color of snow, too, and sharp clear eyes, and hands that look surprisingly gentle. Her musculature, bunching and concertinaing just under the skin whenever she moves, is awe-inspiring. Hina can’t stop looking. 

“Would you like me to spot you?” Sakura asks, voice gentle, when Hina is just going through some stretches in a bit of abandoned corridor, one of the first afternoons they’re let loose in the school. Hina almost falls over.

“Ah – I –“ she stutters, turning round – the one time she wasn’t looking, and Sakura surprised her. Sakura just raises an eyebrow and puts her hand to Hina’s ankle, to steady her.

“Yeah,” Hina answers late, far too late. Her throat feels tight. “Yes. Thank you.” 

**ii.**

When Hina can't sleep at night, she imagines Sakura asleep in her own bed on the other side of the wall, breath deep and even, the immutable moon to Hina's planet. She doesn't imagine Sakura lying beside her - that feels, somehow, like doing something wrong to Sakura without her permission - but she imagines Sakura's broad back in front of her, standing between Hina and her bedroom door, between Hina and the unfathomable, between Hina and human nature.

When Hina does sleep it's fitful, punctuated by dreams where she and Sakura are eating bentos on a school roof - the roof of a school Hina has never been to - and laughing. Sakura laughs with her mouth wide open, her eyes scrunched up in happiness. Her lunch is wrapped in a polka-dot handkerchief, clumsily tied. There's no-one else around. Sakura points to a butterfly floating nearby, and it's so bright that Hina has to shade her eyes with her hand to see.

**iii.**

After they've all been Inside long enough that the days blur when Hina isn’t paying attention, all the girls are spending the evening in the bath, and Hina has a logistics problem.

“Would you like for me to wash your back for you?” Sakura asks, after a second. Sakura is always offering these things - please let me carry that heavy load, let me reach where you can't, let me be useful to you. Hina giggles, makes a face at herself, holds out the washcloth automatically.

“I really looked like I was struggling that bad, huh?” she asks. It’s not really a question – she could feel her own tongue poking out in determination.

Sakura only smiles, serene and unknowable, and sets about her task with the quiet dedication she brings to everything. Sakura knows instinctively what Hina needs, and it should be frightening, but it isn’t. 

Hina burns with more than the water, and from the corner Celes casts knowing eyes on her. Hina turns her face away.

**iv.**

Life isn’t all bad – Sakura finds a box of oranges, bright like jewels, right at the back of the warehouse. It occurs to Hina to wonder who brought them there, why whoever’s in charge would keep something so utterly perishable, but it’s good and everything that is good is so fragile, here. She says nothing.

What’s Sakura’s is Hina’s, and what’s Hina’s is Sakura’s, so they take the box down to the pool and slide in, stopping between laps to peel the oranges with slippery fingers, laughing. There’s no-one to tell them not to eat and swim.

“We should give some to Naegi,” Hina says decidedly, some time later. Her fingertips smell like those scented pens that were so popular back in third grade. 

“Yes,” Sakura agrees easily. She’s lying on her back on the poolside, hands on her stomach. She looks as though she’s sunbathing. “And Kirgiri-san and Fujisaki-san and Owada-san and Ishimaru-san and Yamada-san. And Hagakure-san and Fukawa-san and Celes-san. Everyone.”

“But not Togami!” Hina giggles.

“Asahina-san…” Sakura says, attempting an admonishment. Hina just splashes her with a handful of the pool water, and Sakura lets go, creasing up into a real laugh, big and loud.

|

Swimming isn’t Sakura’s preference, but whenever Hina pulls on her hand, she’ll come. Hina floats on her back in the water and imagines the blue all around her is the sky up above, endless and so, so clear.

Next to her, Sakura swims with even, measured strokes – the stroke of someone who swims from a textbook, not from the soul. Hina smiles. Sakura’s passage rocks her gently, like a lullaby. She closes her eyes.

**v.**

Sakura and Hina team up for a piggyback race against Owada and Fujisaki, and they win. Naegi and Kirigiri and Ishimaru cheer on the sidelines. Celes files her nails, but can’t hide the slant to her mouth that means she’s smiling.

Students die.

Sakura brings Hina her favorite breakfast in the mornings. Hina complains about the taste of the creamer they keep in the warehouse, and imagines birds resting on the sills of the bolted windows. 

Students die.

Hina stops being able to recognize her own face in the mirror in the mornings. She imagines shattering the mirror with a clean punch, and severing herself with the pieces. What will they do to her then?

“You’re going to get out of here,” Sakura says fiercely.

“Sakura-chan –“ Hina says, voice trembling. Sakura shakes her head, those eyes bright and hard again, like a cat’s in the deepest dark.

“You’re going to get out of here,” she repeats. Her grip on Hina’s arm is firm but not painful, as though she’s willing some of her lifeforce into Hina. “You’re going to swim in the ocean again, and I’m going to come to your meets. Remember? The ocean, Hina-san.”

Hina nods, swallowing. The ocean.

**vi.**

The world shatters, and puts itself back together so it can blow up in Hina’s face, all over again. Sakura, slumped in a chair, surrounded by glass. All Hina’s limbs prickle and throb as though she’s been rolling around in the debris.

_You’re going to get out, Hina-san -_

“I never wanted this,” Hina says bitterly over the body, her forehead resting on Sakura’s cold knee. Sakura, the statue felled – Sakura, the work of art laid to rest, still like a sculpture even in her death’s repose.

“Asahina-san –“ Makoto says from behind her, hanging back, frightened.

“I didn’t want to get out this way,” Hina says, barely more than a whisper. Tears slide out to wet Sakura’s knee, slide along her thigh.

“I didn’t – I didn’t know what she meant,” Hina says, and then her voice trips up on itself, stumbles and falls. She didn’t know that Sakura had meant _you’ll get out because I will do anything, because I will _get you_ out._

She should have known, and she didn’t.

**vii.**

Hina has fantasies when they find the bio lab’s morgue – that maybe none of it’s real or final, that maybe the bodies in there can be lifted out and hooked up to something and brought back to life, that Sakura can be brought back to her. They read _Frankenstein_ years ago, a simplified version, in their English class - English isn’t Hina’s best subject, and she doesn’t remember the book that well, but the memory of it means her heart soars when she sees the lights, the little compartments. 

Maybe it isn’t real – maybe they’re going to unlock something else on another floor, an operating theatre, a hospital wing. Maybe this is all one big trick, another part of Sakura’s duty as the spy, and Sakura will reach out from a shadowy place in a back corridor and grab Hina’s wrist, whisper into her ear _Hina-san, can you keep a secret?_

Other, stranger things have already come true.

If Hina pushes hard enough, if she goes through enough class trials, if she unmasks the mastermind, Sakura might come back. She might be being held somewhere, waiting and waiting for the moment they storm the – the dungeons, there could be dungeons here, maybe there’s a basement they haven’t seen yet – and say _we’re here, Sakura, we’ve come for you_.

She pictures Sakura’s face, raised up in joy, her final gambit having paid off. It’s what drives Hina’s feet into the elevator down to the final class trial, has her fingernails making marks in her palms. Her pockets are stuffed with blossoms from the Sakura trees in the dojo, so many that they keep overspilling, falling out when she walks.

_Sakura_ , she thinks, _I’m coming. I promise._


End file.
